Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist, official guest host, and Faith and Freedom Coalition’s State of Tennessee Director Aaron Gulbransen in-studio to give his prediction of a Republican House takeover.
Leahy: We are joined now by all-star panelist and Tennessee state executive director for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, and of course, most importantly, the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report, Mr. Aaron Gulbransen. Good morning, Aaron.
Gulbransen: Good morning, Michael. How are you, sir?
Leahy: I want to thank you for being the official guest host on Friday while I went up to talk to our folks in Ohio at The Ohio Star. I know you just love getting up at 3:30 in the morning so you can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. Does it entirely disrupt your day to do that?
Gulbransen: You know, it’s one of those things, of course, you do this every day, right? But it’s one of those things where … the number of times I’ve done it, either you wind up going to sleep extremely early that night, or then you’re wired and can’t go to sleep until midnight. Which is what happened on Friday.
Leahy: Pretty much, I think that’s, unless you’re in this long-term pattern, right, where every morning you get up at 3:30, what happens is, it’s very difficult. It’s very difficult to change your patterns.
And so if you normally go to bed at 11:00, it’s hard to go to bed, say, at 8:00. Basically, you may put yourself in bed at 8:00, but you’re not going to sleep at 8:00. You’ll still be wired and probably just toss and turn until midnight and get three and a half hours sleep and wake up and rush for the coffee. Is that what happened?
Gulbransen: That’s pretty much the case. And I will say I have no earthly idea why, but I find myself staring at a computer screen a lot less lately, so I do stay up a little later than I was before. (Chuckles)
Leahy: So anyway, you did a great job. I appreciate it. Now, seven weeks until the midterm elections, and I have to tell you, I’d love to get your reaction. There is something I think, just entirely dysfunctional about the way the country isn’t working today, but it’s every aspect of the country, it just seems going wrong, wrong, wrong.
And yet the Democrats are in power, the mainstream media keeps putting out the same garbage, the Big Tech guys keep doing the same things. It looks like, just as a country, we are headed over a cliff. And nothing is being done to change that – except, the hope is in that the midterm elections Republicans will take over the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi will be gone. Maybe go off to be an ambassador to Italy, where she can do less damage than she’s done as Speaker of the House.
Gulbransen: And her husband can drive around Italy with any Yugo, and cause less damage.
Leahy: (Laughter) Yugo. That’s funny. So the question is, but then you look at the polls – and now if you look at the latest polls, and typically, when you talk about the key race being the race for the House of Representatives and you look at sort of this generic poll, right?
What are the generic numbers? Typically, they are pretty much even Steven now. Do you believe these polls, or is there something weird going on?
Gulbransen: Listen, I think former Vice President Biden – that’s the joke that I stole from Steven Crowder – former Vice President Biden’s approval rating, it’s like they flipped the switch and it was in the dumps, and now it’s at 45 percent, depending on what you’re looking at.
I think there’s a bit of cooking of the books going on. I think the media is covering and cherry-picking what they’d like to cover. I think this is a new age of politics here. I think it’s going to happen every single time. I think it happened in 2016. I think it happened in 2018. I think it happened in 2020. I think it’s happening now.
Leahy: So a couple of things. If you look back, let’s go back. I’m looking at the Real Clear Politics average of polls. If you go back to February, in the generic congressional vote, Republicans had a 47.6 to 43.6 lead.
Then let’s go to July. It was 46.8 to 44.3. So it went from four points to 2.5 percent. Now today, as we speak, today on September 20, 2022, they’ve [Democrats] got a slight, Real Clear Politics poll average 1.1 percent increase, with the two latest NBC News poll just released earlier this week – a tie. And then Rasmussen reports Republicans plus-1. What does that portend for the House of Representatives?
Gulbransen: The House of Representatives elections in the off-year midterms, past tends to be prologue in these things. I pay attention, but I don’t pay a lot of credence to these up-or-down national mood polling.
The Republicans are going to pick up seats. They don’t need to pick up a whole heck of a lot. The only question has been, since the beginning of the cycle in the House – and mind you, actually I think they did a pretty good job on candidate recruitment in the House, because the House has their act together on this particular thing.
Anyway, that’s a much lengthier conversation. I do believe the Republicans are going to pick up the House. I never thought redistricting was a big factor in this. I never thought we were going to get like a Newt Gingrich ’94 or 2010 hands-off-my-health-care, 63 or 58.
But we’re still looking at 30 to 40 seats here. There’s still going to be a number of seats that, there’ll be the surprises both ways. New Hampshire, they didn’t do what they could do in redistricting to give Republicans a …
Leahy: They did a great job here in Tennessee, they did a great job. And that’s basically, the congressional delegation here has been, for many years, seven Republicans and two Democrats. That is likely to turn to eight Republicans and one Democrat after the midterm election on November 8.
Why? We’ve talked about this so many times before. And all of the action, by the way, in this, happened before and until August 4th, the primary date. It’s been snoozy at best ever since.
But, of course, the 5th Congressional District, which previously was all of Davidson County and just a little bit of Cheatham and Dickson County, Democrat plus-20, represented since 1875 by a Democrat. And almost since 1875, by Jim Cooper (chuckles).
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
